The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards that I’ve devised in collaboration with the community as an excuse to celebrate the games, experiences and fanbases that have left a particular impression on me in 2018. Find out more and leave a suggestion here!

I’m old enough to remember when weather effects in games were new and exciting.

I have vivid memories of desperately wanting to play Toyota Celica GT Rally on the Atari ST, for example, purely because it had rain, snow and sandstorm effects — and working windscreen wipers!

Nowadays, weather effects are something we just take for granted for the most part… but sometimes, a game comes along and impresses you with its representation of a particular environmental condition. Today’s award celebrates my favourite virtual thunderstorm from the year just passed.

Electronic Arts are pretty widely disliked by much of the gaming community these days, so it’s easy to forget their somewhat humble and interesting roots.

As their name suggests, they favoured releasing titles that were highly interesting and creative — artistic, you might say — rather than just the same old thing we’d seen elsewhere. In many ways, they heralded in one of the earliest eras of the video game “auteur”.

One great example from the early ’80s was Mike Edwards’ Realm of Impossibility, an enhanced and expanded version of Edwards’ earlier game Zombies. This is a non-violent action adventure that tasks you with exploring a variety of isometric dungeons that get increasingly… peculiar in their geometry as the game progresses. Escher would be proud.

The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards that I’ve devised in collaboration with the community as an excuse to celebrate the games, experiences and fanbases that have left a particular impression on me in 2018. Find out more and leave a suggestion here!

A really interesting aspect of characterisation is when creators are able to put together a character who might initially seem obnoxious or odious in some way, then gradually bring the player to sympathise with them — or at least vaguely understand them –over the course of the complete narrative.

It’s a difficult thing to pull off, for sure; the most common approach taken to create this effect is to have an “anti-hero” main character, but in those instances it’s very easy to go overboard on the edginess and just create someone who is an unrelatable sociopath or psychopath.

But when it’s done right, it can make for some really interesting storytelling. So who fell into that category for me this year…?

After some… rather varied results on our last outing, I thought today we’d concentrate on a specific part of OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast.

Specifically, I thought it was time we took a look at the next tier of Flagman’s objectives. These mostly encompass racing and related disciplines, but there are some interesting challenges along the way that aren’t quite what you might normally expect from an arcade racer…

Hit the jump to see how things went today… and if I lost my girlfriend!

Ten days until Christmas! Are you ready? I am, after a flurry of Amazon shopping earlier.

I’m likely going to be taking a few days off from MoeGamer during the holiday season, so from the week after next onwards (i.e. the week that begins with Christmas) updates may be a little intermittent, but I’ll be back on a normal schedule by the new year at the very latest. And with any luck, if my Christmas plans come to fruition, there may be a very special “Episode X” of The MoeGamer Podcast to enjoy — though no promises in that regard just yet.

Anyway, that’s all in the future. What’s been happening in the immediate past? Hit the jump to see what you might have missed this week.

The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards that I’ve devised in collaboration with the community as an excuse to celebrate the games, experiences and fanbases that have left a particular impression on me in 2018. Find out more and leave a suggestion here!

Well, if you’re gonna do “best boy” you’ve got to do “best girl”, haven’t you? And there sure are a lot of wonderful girls to choose from across the games we’ve explored together over the course of the last year.

Those of you who know me well, however, will know that, biases be damned, there’s only one lovely lady who was ever going to win this, given the year’s Cover Game lineup. But just to be fair, I’m going to say that her winning Best Girl this year will preclude her from winning this or any similar award in subsequent years, regardless of whether or not I cover another of her games. Gotta give the others a chance, after all.

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Welcome!

MoeGamer is a site about Japanese (and Japanese-inspired) video games and visual novels as well as retro games. It is written and curated by Pete Davison, formerly of USgamer and GamePro.

MoeGamer’s aim is to provide comprehensive, interesting, positive and well-researched coverage of niche-interest and overlooked, underappreciated titles that often tend to get a raw deal from the mainstream press or are at risk of being forgotten by history.

The focal point of MoeGamer’s coverage is the Cover Game feature: a series of in-depth explorations of individual games or series from both yesterday and today. These special features are punctuated with one-off articles and ongoing series about other noteworthy games or phenomena.